Institutionalised.

Hand in hand. Eyes closed. It's what she wanted all along.

The others had laughed. They were the type for it. Or perhaps they weren't, and that was the problem. Either way, she saw them as straight-road people. The type of road you can see along for miles and miles and miles until the horizon cuts in; a purple faced hopeful who never did manage to print his name on the dance card.

She couldn't bear the thought of it. Of that type of life. Fuzzy, street-cam scenery set on a five year loop, only each time the film is worse...more difficult to decipher. Everybody looks older. In fact, everybody gets older. They have aspirations. Cook, clean, sit and die. It's just a piece of paper. Why complicate life with living?

She wanted it if only for the distraction. Death. A perpetual deadline. It would come for her eventually. Perhaps suddenly, with a bang and a clatter...perhaps not for a while - a sigh on the stalk, ready to volunteer itself as the last in a long, long line. She didn't know - couldn't know anything other than that there was no avoiding it. Experience wouldn't buy her immortality - not the valuable brand of it, anyway - but it would buy her satisfaction. Better yet, it put a few bends in the road; a left turn here and there, and she could duck out of grim sight, even if only for a moment or two.

Hand in hand. Eyes closed. It's what she wanted all along. It's just a piece of paper. She knows it - she barely glanced when they asked her to sign. But it wasn't the paper that mattered - not the paper, the dress...not even the ring.

It was the excitement. The difference. Time is cruel - a year, tedious. One must suffer through 365 days, most very similar to the one before, and so it goes and goes and goes until ring around the rosie, we all fall down. An engagement gave her something to differentiate from simply being. To look forward to.

Besides, it conjured a fantastic sensibility. The happiness was heroin to her - something to be abused until supply ran out, or else, until it damn near killed her. She was hooked - wired by the planning, by the panic. To imagine missing out on it! Gold coins slipping through invisible fingers that grabbed and missed angrily. Eyes closed to falling snow. The absurdity was nauseating!

And at the same time she was terrified. A steady lead-up of nervous flutter and pedantic organisation and it would be done with - over in a brilliant crescendo of white taffeta and violets. She would be back to where she started - searching for another distraction; a career; a baby - anything to magic her world of impermanency and farce into a more durable existence. To make it mean something. She frowned at the thought of it.

But as he smiled at her over the three-tiered cake, she was very suddenly at ease. No. The others, they were wrong. They, the have-alls, were content with being, because it jeopardised nothing. They valued monotony.

Right then, she didn't care that marriage was a cliche. She had gone tree-climbing in purple silk dresses, hooked rod in hand, and the hope in mind that perhaps, if only for a day, her world might spin in a different direction.

She would throw the wedding certificate out. It wasn't important.

Everything else had been.